Terminal Island Read Online Free Page B

American Graffiti. It had been a working-class town for the most part—longshoremen and fishermen and shipyard workers.
    There was a pang in his heart as he passed the building that had been Macowan’s Market, now a 99-Cent Only Store scrawled with Christmas designs. Two or three times a week, after junior high, he and Billy Engels would hunker down behind the magazine rack with a bag of Bell Brand barbecued potato chips and big RC Colas—sixteen-ouncers—and read the science fiction comics one after another. Once he’d read for so long that his legs had gone completely to sleep and in trying to stand up he’d fallen flat on his face, astonished by his rubbery, numb appendages. The clerk knew they were there, of course, but he had let them read their way through his comics for free on some kindly impulse of a bygone era.
    He tried to stay numb to all that nostalgia as he motored past the ferry building, which had been turned into a maritime museum, and then through the seemingly endless square miles of lovely old California bungalows that spread over the rolling hills above the harbor. In fact, as he parked the VW, the bungalow that waited up a scabby lawn looked eerily familiar to him, and he wondered if he’d been better friends with Petricich and his family than he remembered.
    “Your house looks awfully familiar,” Jack Liffey admitted, sipping the wonderfully strong black coffee Dan’s wife had poured out for him.
    “Sure, sure,” Dan Petricich said. “Everybody thinks so. We rented the place out to Polanski for Chinatown. Remember Curly’s house? Three days of shooting, and it made us more than a good month of a tuna run in the old days.”
    They sat around a big scarred-up oak table, having a hearty late breakfast because Dan’s boat, the Sanja P., had been out squidding all night and had just come in and offloaded. Dan looked suitably spaced out by exhaustion, his hair awry and radiating a certain fishy pung into the room, but it didn’t stop him shoveling down fried potatoes and eggs and sausages, which were regularly replenished by his plump blond wife, Marin. She hovered over them, having been introduced to Jack Liffey as “my damned Swede.” A fantastically leathered old man sat at the end of the table, competing hard with Dan for all the food he could spear. Ante Petricich, the patriarch and original owner of the Sanja P.
    “Fishing was always this big fight between Yugoslavs and Italians,” Jack Liffey said. “All my youth. I knew kids on both sides—Mardesiches and Pescaras.”
    “You remember wrong,” the old man put in in a harsh croak. “It was Croatians and fuckin’ Sicilians, what it was, in fact. Know how you can tell a fuckin’ Sicilian boat?” It was a rhetorical question, and Jack Liffey had no intention of answering. “They got a big open bridge so the fuckin’ hotheaded Sicilian captain can stand up there like some puffed-up godfather all day cursing and swearing at everybody. Croatian boats got a nice professional closed wheelhouse.”
    “The tuna’s gone, isn’t it?” Jack Liffey said.
    The old man shrugged. “Fuckin’ longline boats out of Japan. Ten miles of hooks. It’s like nuking the sea. Tuna was a real man’s fish to catch. Squid is for sissies. I quit when we started using lights.”
    “It pays the bills, Pops.”
    The old man gave a snort. “They shine these big lights into the water to pull them up like magnets. It’s no better than jacklighting deer.”
    “The tuna didn’t have much of a chance either, did they?” Jack Liffey said. “I always figured the only fair fishing would be if you gave the tuna automatic weapons.”
    Dan Petricich laughed. “We got so much sonar and GPS stuff and spotter planes these days the squid are sitting ducks.”
    “Wouldn’t you like some eggs and sausages, Mr. Liffey? I can make fresh.”
    “No, thanks. I already ate.” He tried to remember a Swedish Marin in his class but could only recall a Swedish Carol